Motion information, e.g., salient motion detection, plays an important role in many vision based applications or systems such as surveillance and targeting systems. Salient motion is defined to be motion that tends to move in a consistent direction over time. However, in a given situation, some motion based information is relevant to the tasks at hand, while other motion based information simply provides competing detail. Namely, image motion can arise from "noninteresting" objects as well as "interesting" ones.
For example, surveillance-defined detection and tracking tasks can benefit from certain types of visual motion, while being hampered by other types of visual motion. Depending on the specific scene conditions, the difficulty of these tasks can vary widely. Some of the more challenging domains are those in which motion is being exhibited not just by the "salient" objects or objects of interest (e.g., a person or vehicle traveling with a sense of direction through a scene), but also by other "non-salient" objects (e.g., the scintillation of specularities on water, or the oscillation of vegetation in the wind). Non-salient motions of this type are a common source of false positives for most simple motion-detection schemes, which either detect areas of frame-to-frame intensity change, or areas of intensity change with respect to some reference representation. Although the reference representation can also be a learned probability distribution of intensities at each pixel, and such a system can, over time, learn not to report non-salient changes, it will still give rise to false positives for some time until the reference representation has been learned.
Therefore, a need exists in the art for a method and apparatus for detecting salient motion.